NEW EVIDENCE OF HUMAN RIGHTS ABUSE IN CHINA'S ONE-CHILD POLICY
by Rita Joseph
June 1995
With this week's Amnesty International revelations of torture and
human rights abuse in China, the Australian Government, together
with the Australian Federal Court, now face a dilemma. They face
the delicate task of having to remove egg-on-the-face as
discreetly and smoothly as possible. Both have been in denial
mode, expressing official doubt that the Chinese Government has
any direct involvement in authorizing the use of force in
implementing its one-child policy. The Full Court of the Federal
Court recently ruled that there was no evidence that forced
sterilization formed part of the law or formal government policy
in China. Now, however, Amnesty International has established
once and for all and beyond doubt that the Chinese Government is
directly and widely implicated in coercive fertility control
practices such as enforced sterilization and abortion.
Some of the details are gruesome. Mary Meehan, in the National
Catholic Register April 30, gave a disturbing account of illegal
arrests and torture of those couples who have not complied with
the government's one-child rule. Treatment ranged from being
hung upside down, squeezed under chairs, tied to poles under the
summer sun or tied outside their cells in freezing winter
temperatures, to sexual abuse and the use of electrified batons.
Amnesty International has gathered its evidence with the usual
painstaking thoroughness from many different sources. One major
source, corroborated by other evidence, has been an appeal
smuggled out of China, a plea called "Birth Control Through
Torture" written by the villagers of Fengjiazhuang and
Longtiangou, two small Catholic towns in Hebei Province. These
two villages, according to Amnesty, were targeted in a birth
control offensive started a year ago with the slogan "Better to
have more graves than more than one child".
Family planning officials from the neighbouring town of Ciyu sent
teams to the villages to collect fines, and those unable to pay
were taken away and jailed in Ciyu. All those arrested, the
appeal said, were injured. All were constantly chained hand and
foot, even when they fainted or passed out. According to the
Washington-based human rights group, the Puebla Institute, the
authorities attacked and looted homes, arrested people
indiscriminately and tortured the elderly.
Sooner or later, both the Australian Government and the Federal
Court must come out of denial mode and officially acknowledge the
horror of the abuses being systemically perpetrated under China's
one-child policy. History will not judge kindly this extreme
reluctance to face the terrible truth and to denounce Chinese
Government abuses unequivocally. It has never been right to play
along with official diplomatic cover-ups, under the feeble excuse
that there has been no official confirmation by the offending
government. It wasn't right at the time of the Holocaust and it
isn't right now. How diligently the Allied governments tried not
to know about what was happening in the Germany! They knew all
right. The rumours had turned to detailed reports, and escapees
brought reams of accumulated evidence that all dovetailed
accurately. But officially there was no evidence. "Officially",
that was the weazel word, the let-out, the escape word, so that
when official evidence finally arrived, it was too late. For six
million victims, it was too late.
For many of today's Chinese victims of the savage one-child
policy, it is also too late. There is a distinct analogy to be
acknowledged between China's one-child policy and Hitler's
population policy. Human rights should not be tied either to the
race or to the order in the family into which a human being is
born. Yet second-born children are being exterminated in China,
and their "second-ness" is very much like "Jewish-ness" in that a
second Chinese child has no more control over his "second-ness"
than a Jewish child has over his "Jewish-ness". It is no more
possible for a second-born child in Jiang Zemin's China to hide,
or to remove or to make reparation for the perceived
offensiveness of his "second-ness" than for a Jewish-born child
in Hitler's Germany to hide or to remove or to make reparation
for the perceived offensiveness of his "Jewish-ness".
Anyone who genuinely doubts the persecutory nature of current
atrocities associated with China's one-child policy, has only to
read the incisive account furnished by Stephen Mosher to the
Senate Inquiry on Australia's proposed new refugee laws. It was
as a Stanford anthropologist working in a Chinese rural commune
in 1980 that Stephen Mosher first alerted the world to the
vicious nature of the one-child policy. The following are well
documented by Mosher to be both routine and widespread:
* Forced full-term abortions: mothers arriving in labour at
the hospital are asked for their child-bearing licences. Babies
being delivered without a licence are given "the poison shot". A
hypodermic syringe filled with iodine or formaldehyde is injected
through a 5cm needle directly into the soft part of the baby's
head as it crowns. The baby can take up to 48 hours to die.
* Detection of unauthorized pregnancies, even if it is a first
pregnancy, means compulsory abortion. Mothers who express
reluctance are subjected first to "study sessions", then to
harassment; fathers who won't persuade mothers to abort are
beaten and imprisoned, and extended family members are harassed,
threatened, and fined daily for the mother's recalcitrance until
the mother's "consent" is successfully forced. Higher
authorities use the Nazi tactic of punishing the whole village or
the whole factory for the escape of even one mother with an
unlicensed baby.
The Keating Government must stop hedging on the issue of Chinese
persecution of couples with unauthorized children. Without open,
up-front condemnation of flourishing Chinese human rights abuses,
it would be unbearably shameful and hypocritical if our
delegation to the Beijing UN Women's Conference in September
blithely joins China in ratifying the Beijing Platform of Action,
especially Paragraph 96. This paragraph speaks of "...recognition
of the basic right of all couples and individuals to decide
freely and responsibly the number, spacing and timing of their
children... and their right to make decisions concerning
reproduction free of discrimination, coercion and violence, as
expressed in human rights documents."
An Australian Government that is even now seeking to narrow the
definition of persecution and of refugee status to exclude
victims of China's one-child policy, has absolutely no moral
right to sign a genuine agreement with the principles of
Paragraph 96. Senator Bolkus's Migration Legislation Amendment
Bill (No4) is not compatible with the human rights principles
expressed in the Beijing document. Perhaps Senator Bolkus needs
to be reminded of the High Court's recent ruling that the Federal
Government must make all decisions in accordance with the terms
of its international conventions, even if they are not reflected
in Australian law. Ratification by Australia is "not to be
dismissed as a merely platitudinous or ineffectual act". Rather
ratification is "a positive statement by the executive government
of this country to the world and to the Australian people that
the executive government and its agencies will act in accordance
with the convention".
There can be no longer even a skerrick of moral rectitude in the
Keating Government's continued acceptance of the Chinese
Government's lies about human rights abuses endemic in the one-
child policy as being merely "rogue applications" by a few
overzealous local authorities. Refugees have been telling us
differently.
Had some national governments accepted and listened to the
refugees aboard the USS Saint Louis in 1939 and made a strong
concerted condemnation then of Hitler's Jewish population policy,
the terrible course of the Holocaust and perhaps even World War
II may have been averted. Perhaps these Chinese refugees now
reaching Australian shores are bringing a similar warning about
the futility of appeasement. We should listen to them.
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